From Michael Polanyi (03 December 1962)

From Karl Polanyi
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My Dear Karli,

Please don’t worry. I was so very pleased by the news you gave me in the first three quarters of your letter, that I was fairly taken aback by your angry words which followed. You speak of a wholesale corruption due to the expenditure of 10 billion dollars by the US on anti-communist publications. [...]

You can’t expect me to feel that you are merely expressing ‘differences of opinion’ if you use such adjectives as ‘obscene’, ‘corrupt’, etc. in a context which appears to be aiming at this activity and company with which I have been proud to be associated for ad decade on my life. I shall presently send you a list of my writings on philosophy and public affairs, going back to 1935 which a Ph.D. student is about to compile here. I shall be glad to have your criticism of any of these statements. I shall also be glad to have any criticism you may write to make of the policy of the Congress for Culture of Freedom since its foundation in 1950. But please spare me vague diatribes against unspecified targets.

Looking back, for my part, on my writings during, the past 27 years or so, which include about 100 titles, I have no acute sense of embarrassment in facing what I have written. To have objected to Stalin, before the 20th Party Congress, does not seen to me to have been a betrayal of any great cause, but a very needful warming, against a great evil. I will not accept any moral reproaches on this score. Nor will I tolerate any comparison with the campaign of fanatical mendacity conducted for so many years by the Third International (a comparison that your letter draws in respect of some unspecified anti-communist structure financed by the 10 billions of the US).

Well, I suppose this is what you wanted to know. Please do not take the mater too seriously we shall get along anyhow. I was about to forget the whole business when your letter asked me to tell you what I objected to if you must do these things, I shall not mind. It is of no importance between brothers,

Misi

Text Informations

KPA: 57/07, 45-46